All of the poems in
Surf Music
are short, and some are funny. At least one or two were written on an electric typewriter given to the author sometime during his freshman year of high school. It would be nice to say that R.S. Deese was destined to write poems, but if the immediate and visceral pleasures that the typewriter provided, with its hum and the striking sound of its hammers, are subtracted, it becomes hard to imagine how else this would have started.
One thing that kept Deese coming back to poems, long after that typewriter had wandered away, was the feeling that writing a decent poem could be like solving an algebra problem, without the math. One might be able to find the value of a single variable, or at least define the relationship between two variables in the clearest possible terms.
is part of that equation, and it feels good.